By Rima Najjar
How Israel and the U.S. Keep Miscalculating Palestinian Power
Author’s note: For over a century, external powers have attempted to engineer Palestinian politics from above. This essay argues that U.S.–Israeli strategies consistently miscalculate Palestinian resilience, and that Trump’s plan is only the latest iteration of this failed logic.
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At this point, it is hard not to wonder which phase of Trump’s Gaza–West Bank plan we are living through: forced demilitarization, territorial fragmentation, or the installation of a local administration under permanent Israeli security control. In practice, these stages have collapsed into one another.
On the surface, the plan appears to be advancing. Daily Israeli incursions into the West Bank — this morning Nablus, yesterday Jenin — reproduce the familiar cadence of control. “Ceasefires” are punctured almost nightly by Israeli violations, while the Palestinian death toll rises steadily, echoing the pattern before October 7.
Coverage has reverted to the routine architecture of domination: pre-dawn raids, checkpoint killings, mass arrests, and the relentless attrition of a people meant to remain “manageable.” Yet there is scant acknowledgment of the resistance that exposed the limits of Israeli and American power.
During the period between October 7 and the ceasefire, Arab media revealed something extraordinary amid devastation: Palestinian armed groups endured, administered, and repeatedly challenged an army backed by the full weight of U.S. power. Against every prediction, they survived for over a year. Has subjugation finally been achieved? Evidence suggests otherwise.
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Hamas Re-emerges, Society Endures
After the 2025 ceasefires, Hamas officials and police returned to Gaza’s streets with remarkable speed: patrolling neighborhoods, distributing aid, reasserting authority, enforcing order — sometimes harshly through executions of alleged collaborators — and overseeing hostage exchanges. Reuters and The New York Times described Hamas as “swiftly reestablishing its hold” wherever Israeli troops withdrew — parading fighters, regulating commerce, even setting prices for essential goods.
This policing signals several realities: local communities continue to recognize Hamas’s power; enough organizational structure survives to enforce rules; the movement’s command was battered, not broken.
Polling data underscores a paradox. While many Palestinians resent Hamas for authoritarianism and the destruction wrought by war, there is overwhelming rejection of unilateral disarmament imposed from outside.
That opposition forms a bright line: no pacification on foreign terms, no surrender orchestrated in distant capitals. Simultaneously, distrust Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, runs deep, fueling a preference for technocratic or unity governments.
Here lies the core contradiction. Trump’s 2020 plan — like other U.S.-sponsored proposals — offers a “reformed” technocratic Palestinian administration, but only after disarmament Palestinians overwhelmingly reject. The governance model they prefer is dangled as a reward for capitulation.
Yet even when such administrations are installed — whether under figures like Mohammad Shtayyeh or other technocrats — they remain stripped of sovereignty, operating under the shadow of Israeli security primacy and donor dependency.
In practice, these governments cannot exercise independent authority over borders, resources, or security, making them administrative shells rather than sovereign institutions.
And while regional governments — Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf monarchies — have repeatedly aligned with U.S. and Israeli frameworks, their publics remain far more sympathetic to Palestinian rights. This disjuncture reinforces the theme: power is exercised from above, but legitimacy resides below.
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The Historical Pattern of Subjugation And Reawakening
Hamas was never designed for day-to-day governance. Its identity is armed resistance, not bureaucracy. It was forced into administration only after its 2006 electoral victory triggered isolation, blockade, and rupture with Fatah — circumstances that pushed it into managing a besieged enclave it never intended to rule indefinitely.
Palestinian resistance has upended the central premise of U.S.–Israeli policy: that overwhelming force, diplomatic backing, and infrastructural destruction would quickly break both armed resistance and political cohesion. Instead, history shows otherwise:
The pattern is relentless. The British crushed the 1936–39 Revolt, exiled leaders, banned parties — Palestinian society reconstituted underground and fought in 1947–48. Jordan and Egypt suppressed the fedayeen — out of exile the PLO was born. Israel’s military occupation bred the First Intifada. Oslo’s “state-building” doubled settlements and detonated the Second Intifada, ending in Hamas’s electoral victory. The Gaza blockade entrenched Hamas. The 2023–25 war tried total decapitation — Hamas reappeared faster than Israel withdrew.
Each time the colonial power believes it has engineered the final generation of Palestinian submission. Each time the next cohort proves more unwilling than the last. Seen through this lens, Hamas’s re-emergence is not an aberration but the predictable outcome. — -
The Limits of Coercion
For fifteen straight months (October 2023 — January 2025), Palestinian factions fought under conditions no modern armed movement has ever survived: total siege, continuous bombardment, destruction of hospitals, universities, bakeries, communications blackouts, induced famine. Israel declared brigade after brigade “eliminated.” They reappeared. Commanders were assassinated; replacements stepped forward within days.
This was never just about tunnels or Iranian missiles. It was the sociological fact that Palestinian society — clan networks, neighborhood committees, shared refusal of surrender — is more resilient than the hierarchical structures Israel is designed to decapitate.
Western analysts still describe this as “Hamas resilience.” It is not. It is the resilience of a people whose collective identity and claim to land remain intact despite devastation. When belonging itself is the last possession, no amount of military destruction can extinguish the will to resist.
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Conclusion: The Lesson Refused
The United States and Israel continue to believe that if they destroy enough, fragment enough, and install enough collaborators, the Palestinian national subject will dissolve. History keeps answering: it reconstitutes, often harder, more absolute, more exclusive than before.
Until the political conditions that generate armed resistance — occupation, siege, fragmentation, denial of sovereignty and return — are dismantled rather than managed, the next iteration is already growing in the rubble. The delusion of finality will be attempted again, with new technology, new administrators, new resolutions. And it will fail again.
Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. The question is not whether Palestinians will endure — they already have — but what lesson the United States and Israel imagine they are learning. If the lesson drawn from a century of failed coercion is to double down on coercion, the cycle will reproduce itself. If the lesson they refuse to learn is that legitimacy cannot be manufactured at gunpoint, then the very forces they aim to eradicate will continue to endure — not because they are invincible, but because the political conditions that generate them remain untouched.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
21 November 2025
Source: countercurrents.org